A Day of Remembrance (Exodus 12:1-14; Maundy Thursday A; April 17, 2014)

A Day of Remembrance

Exodus 12:1-14
Maundy Thursday A
April 17, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I’ve been enjoying having our daughter and granddaughter visiting with us this week.  It’s got me to thinking about family and what makes people into one.  How does someone become a Caldwell?  You can ask Carol about that.  Legally, she became a Caldwell when she married me.  On her driver’s license it says that her last name is Caldwell.  But that’s not how she really became a Caldwell.  No, that happened over the next several years as we spent holiday dinners around my family’s table.  She learned the Caldwell stories, like the time when we lived in Texas when my dad was in flight training in the Air Force and the oldest three of the four siblings, having been warned never under any circumstances to go near the base dentist’s office because there was a nest of rattlesnakes under it, went to the base dentist’s office and looked under the building to see if we could find the snakes for ourselves and how, though she had not yet been born, our youngest sister Jenny remembers it as if she were there herself.  And in a way she was.

Carol learned the peculiar ways that Caldwell’s talk.  In our family, “Tut, tut,” means that we should be prepared for rain and “You’re not so dumb as you look” is a compliment. 

Carol learned more about me than I ever wanted her to know.  When I was thirteen or so I showed Jenny who was maybe six how to crawl out of the windows on the second floor dormer of our house and, by holding on to the underside of the siding shingles, make her way along the gutter to the end of the dormer and then to the roof.  It was a really stupid thing for me to have done, although, in my defense, Jenny had caught me exiting my window and had threatened to rat me out if I didn’t show her how to do it.

How does someone become a Caldwell?  Carol became a Caldwell by learning the stories, learning the language, and participating in the family rituals.  That’s how a Caldwell becomes a Caldwell.

I have told you these things, not so that you, too, may become a Caldwell, but because there is little difference between how a Caldwell becomes a Caldwell and how a Christian becomes a Christian or how a Jew becomes a Jew. 

On the face of it, our reading from Exodus seems to be a history of one of the events that are a part of the story of the Israelite’s liberation from slavery in Egypt.  Looking more closely we see that it is a set of instructions for how the Israelites were to prepare and eat their last meal in Egypt.  They are to eat a roasted lamb.  When they slaughter the lamb, they are to splash some of the blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses.  They are to eat the lamb quickly, dressed for travel, with sandals on their feet, their robes girded up so that they can walk easily, and with their walking sticks in one hand.

This will be a night of terror and of freedom.  Yahweh will be passing through Egypt on a murderous rampage, killing the first-born of every household.  The blood that they have splashed on their door frames “will be a sign for [the Israelites]”, but it is clear that this is, at best, a stretching of the truth.  The blood will in fact be a sign for Yahweh who will see the blood and pass over the homes of the Israelites, killing only the first-born of the Egyptian households. 

This, as I said, is one part of the story of how Israel was set free, how Israel became God’s people, how Israel began its march toward the fulfillment of God’s promises to their ancestors.  But it is more than a history, more than a story of “once upon a time in a kingdom far away.”

It is also a set of instructions for the reader: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”  This is a story that is told and acted out every year, as our Jewish friends are doing this week. 

This is how a Jew becomes a Jew.  She grows up hearing the stories told around the family’s table at Passover and Rosh Hashanah.  She hears the stories of her great Uncle Shmuel who survived Auschwitz and of her great grandparents who did not.  She hears all the stories of her family, but framing these stories and providing their foundation she hears and acts out a larger story, the story of God’s people and their liberation from slavery.  She eats roasted lamb on Passover and she is ready herself to search for the promise of a life of justice and peace.

Grounded in this same story of liberation is another story.  It is the story that we tell of a night like this one, a night of freedom and terror, when Jesus gathered with his friends.  It was right around Passover time, perhaps, if Matthew, Mark and Luke are to be believed, it was even Passover itself.  Jesus and his friends gathered around a table and Jesus gave them a new meal, also a meal to celebrate a coming liberation, a meal that looks forward to a promise kept. 

Paul tells us that this meal had already become a part of the Christian tradition.  “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” he said.  This is the language of a tradition that is received and transmitted.  Paul may have shaped this tradition; everyone who passes on a tradition shapes it a little.  But Paul did not make this up.  Paul received this meal tradition from someone in the Church.  Paul passed this on to the Corinthian church.  And so it has come to us.

How does a Christian become a Christian if being a Christian is more than saying in public that we accept certain beliefs, if being a Christian is more than acting decently toward each other?  How does a Christian become a Christian, if being a Christian is a matter of identity, a matter of who we are?  A Christian becomes a Christian by learning the stories, learning them and becoming a part of them, acting them out.  A Christian becomes a Christian by gathering around a table with other Christians and becoming a part of the long story that begins with frightened Israelites huddled in their houses on that night of terror and freedom, becoming a part of the long story that takes a new turn when Jesus gathered his friends, took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body that is broken for you.  Do this to remember me.”

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